Book review: Mystery in loyalty and betrayal

The Blue Hour is an absorbing read. It’s not a conventional thriller, it’s a compelling mystery, which unfolds slowly, revealing a web of secrets and lies. 

The narrative moves between the present and the past, and you keep reading because you feel compelled to discover what happened. 

It’s the fourth novel from the author of the bestseller The Girl on the Train, which sold more than 23m copies worldwide and was also made into a film.

It is mostly set on Eris, a Scottish island, which is only accessible to the mainland for a few hours a day. There’s only one house on the island, and only one person now living there. 

That isolation creates a claustrophobic atmosphere and provides the ideal setting for a dark, unsettling plot.

Three main characters feature, the late artist Vanessa Chapman, her former companion Grace Haswell and James Becker, curator at the foundation which manages the artist’s estate. 

The Tate Modern is organising a retrospective of Vanessa’s work when a forensic anthropologist sees one of her sculptures, made of found objects that include what’s described as an animal bone. However, it’s actually a human rib bone.

Becker has always adored Vanessa’s work, he verges on an obsession with it, so loves his job at the Fairburn Foundation, housed at a stately home owned by the Lennox family. 

However, his life is rather complicated as his wife Helena was engaged to his employer and best friend Sebastian when they met. Now they are expecting a baby and living in a lodge on the estate. 

Sebastian’s mother Lady Emmeline does not approve of them. She was widowed when her husband was shot accidentally — or was he? That’s one of the questions the reader wants answered.

Sebastian sends Becker to Eris to investigate the possible source of the human bone and also to make Grace hand over the remainder of Vanessa’s legacy, which she had left in her will to the foundation. 

Extracts from Vanessa’s diary and some of her letters are interspersed through the novel. 

As James and Grace bond over their mutual love and admiration for Vanessa, those pages provide some flashbacks. 

One mystery is the disappearance of Vanessa’s notoriously unfaithful husband Julian after visiting her on Eris 20 years before. Rumours swirl in the press that the rib bone may have been his.

Through her letters and diary extracts Vanessa gives interesting insights into not only her own work but also her beliefs and theories about art in general. 

However, she also reveals herself to be a rather complicated and often selfish woman, and not very likeable.

Grace, a retired doctor, was devoted to her and lived with her on and off. She even nursed her when she was dying of cancer. It was therefore a huge surprise that Vanessa had left her estate to Sebastian’s father Douglas rather than to Grace. 

Douglas owned a gallery where he exhibited her work, they were also lovers, but had a huge row before her death, so why did she leave everything to him? 

Gradually, how that happened is revealed. What is also slowly uncovered is the true nature of the relationship between Grace and Vanessa.

The novel explores a number of themes, among them loyalty and betrayal, class, artistic inspiration, isolation, the desire to belong. The characters are convincing and Grace in particular is unforgettable.